


One Large Hatsune Miku Poster (And other things you don't expect to find in a mad scientist's filing cabinets)

by Aquelon



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Redstoner - Fandom, The Crafting Dead
Genre: CROSSOVER CONTENT, Gen, The Major Character Death is not onscreen, This takes place in Xin's redstoner + tcd au, and kinda a cornerstone of this au, bam technically there's angst, but it's both seen in photographs (which they don't entirely realize), but mostly it's just everyone is very confused
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-14 01:20:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15377568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aquelon/pseuds/Aquelon
Summary: A supply trip finds some... unexpected things in an abandoned restaurant.Interests they wouldn't expect.Photos that shouldn't exist.There's more here than meets the eye.





	One Large Hatsune Miku Poster (And other things you don't expect to find in a mad scientist's filing cabinets)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [craftingdead](https://archiveofourown.org/users/craftingdead/gifts).



> Charlie I will help you on your ao3 MISSION  
> fun fact: The Zombie Song, which is an actual song, is canonically playing on loop in the background both for all the important parts of this fic and as I wrote this fic.

Shelby was leading a scavenging party to try and get more supplies while they waited for Nick and Ghetto to get back from their extended supply run when they found out. They were passing an empty restaurant when Jess abruptly called for the team to stop.

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Shelby asked, grabbing Max by the shoulder in case he tried to do something dumb.

“There’s music playing in that restaurant.” Now that Jess had pointed it out, it was kind of hard to miss. The unmistakable rhythm of some vocaloid song echoed faintly through the windows of an abandoned--

“Oh yes, an IHOP!” Max said, immediately going into it and also rambling in the background.

“Should we g--” Shelby stopped asking that question. “Well, here goes nothing, right?”

“I guess so,” Jess replied, and then turned to look at the other member of their party. “You okay, Barney? You look kind of nervous.”

“Yeah, I’s fine.” Barney didn’t look it, but he did follow the girls into the restaurant. “I just… I don’t really like this song.”

“No duh,” Shelby quipped, looking at his expression. “If you wanna try somewhere else just let us know. Reckon we’ll find anything good in here?”

“I’m hoping for someone who doesn’t want to kill us. Whoever’s playing that music.” Jess pushed a crate in front of the door to delay any zombies that wanted to come in.

Max popped up from behind the counter abruptly, startling everyone. “I found moldy pancakes!” He plopped them down on the counter, ignoring the chorus of “eww”s from everyone else.

Everyone looked around the mostly empty restaurant. There were no traces of whoever was playing the music and, other than moldy food, it was picked clean of supplies.

“There’s some kind of residue on the stove,” Shelby pointed out. “Smells awful.”

“The storeroom’s locked,” Jess called from where she was struggling with the handle. “I can’t tell if anyone is there and just doesn’t want to talk, or if they’re out or it’s empty.”

The vocaloid song, which had been playing on loop since they got there, faded out, and another song started. Barney looked up at the loudspeakers with a degree of both annoyance and concern. “What kind of persons plays the zombie song in the middle of the apocalypse?!”

“Someone with weird coping mechanisms?” Jess suggested.

“Someone with a dark sense of humour?” Shelby said at the same time.

“Someone who never updates their music playlist?” Max added from the general direction of the dining area.

“Well, I thinks that was the music in my nightmares once,” Barney replied.

They looked around a bit more, but there wasn’t much they hadn’t already seen.

“If there’s nothing else in here, we should leave,” Shelby finally, reluctantly suggested.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Max vaulted back over the counter before they could properly leave. “I want to play with the cash register! I didn’t get to do that yet.”

Shelby sighed, but there really was no stopping him. “Fine.”

“I was hoping there’d be more in here,” Jess commented.

Shelby thought about it. “Yeah, why else would there be a functioning loudspeaker system?”

“Hey,” Max yelled from behind the counter, “the 5 on this cash register is worn, like, right off. Whoever’s here must really like the number 5!”

There was a few seconds of silence, and then he added, “I’m gonna press it!”

“What--” Shelby was interrupted as Max evidently pressed it and there was a loud click. Although the angle from the door wasn’t the best, it looked like… “did that open the storeroom?!”

Everyone rushed over to the storeroom, whose door was now wide open. The storeroom itself was evidently in the basement, and the song was also playing from somewhere at the bottom of the dimly lit stairs.

“We’re going down there, right?” Max kinda confirmed. “It’s a mysterious staircase, we can’t not!”

“Yeah, but be careful, we don’t know who lives there,” replied Shelby.

“Yeah, yeah… yeah.” Max started to rush down the stairs and then stopped.

Shelby followed, but still more tentatively. Barney stayed at the back of the group, but still all four of them made it down. Shelby found herself reaching out for a hand to hold, and then remembering that Nick was on a different supply trip.

The storeroom… was heavily modified. Where you’d expect freezers and racks, there were lots of filing cabinets. The LEDs on the ceiling were faint, and the room was mostly lit by the relatively dim torchlight of some sort of weird red torch, which emitted a faint red dust.

In one corner, several open freezer doors were arranged in a circle in such a way that if they all closed, they’d make some sort of walled capsule. Barney took one look at the weird door thing and immediately hid behind Jess. “Guys… don’ts touch that things. I don’t know whats it is, but I don’t likes it.”

“Got it,” Shelby said. “I don’t see anyone in here, but we can probably look and see what we can find out and let them know if they get back.”

They split up just enough to all check different filing cabinets. Shelby gently slid one of the drawers open, and as soon as she looked at the labelling for the file folders, she got nervous.

‘Formula X: Notes’; ‘Formula X: Testing’

“I think these are Dr. Ross’s notes!”

Barney, who’d been opening a file folder across the room, dropped it like a hot potato.

Jess looked up in alarm. “So does that mean that Ross was here?”

“They’re all neatly organized; I don’t think anyone who stole his notes would go to that much effort. Or have this many.”

Barney was pacing back and forth by this point. “Oh, I don’t likes this…”

Jess put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but let him keep pacing. “What do we do? He could be back at any time!”

“I don’ts want to think about that!” Barney yelled at just above a whisper.

“We should try to find out as much as we can as quickly as we can,” Shelby decided. “But keep your weapons ready.”

“Wait,” Max said, looking up from where he was sitting on the floor. “When you guys are talking about Dr. Ross, you’re talking about Dr. Ross Dr. Ross?”

“Yeah? Who else would it be?” Shelby asked.

“I mean, there’s probably a lot of people named Ross in the world… anyway, yeah, I don’t like that guy.”

“I don’t think anyone does,” Jess replied, already starting to quickly check the filing cabinets.

“He didn’t want to play UNO.” Max was jabbing at the wall with his cleaver. “Also, he hurt my roommate, and there’s a bunch of other stuff that I don’t remember.”

“Wha--? Nevermind.” Shelby briefly inspected a row of filing cabinets with labels like ‘Formula 64’, ‘Memory Experiment 16-A’, and ‘Observations: December Year 1’ (which was an exhaustive catalogue on everything Nick’s group had done in that month).

Finally, she got to the filing cabinet at the end of the room. Jess was checking the filing cabinets on the other side of the room, and seemed to have found a noteworthy or interesting package. Barney was watching the entrance, and Max seemed determined to take a chunk out of the wall.

The top drawer of the filing cabinet had been taken out and replaced with a small locked door. The bottom drawer was labelled interestingly, certainly different from the other filing cabinets.

In some sort of red ink, a circle with lines radiating off it had been painted on the drawer, and then someone had seemingly tried to scrub it off. The label read simply, ‘research images’. Shelby slid it open, already leaning over it and reaching into it.

Suddenly, the hand reaching into the drawer was the only thing on something solid.

Shelby held on for dear life and made the mistake of looking down. The floor was mechanically falling away, leaving her grip on the drawer the only thing preventing a sheer fall into what looked like a blocked-off chunk of the sewer system. It didn’t look like an unsurvivable fall, but it also didn’t look like there was a way out of the pit trap.

Shelby really didn’t want to know what would happen if she was in that hole when Dr. Ross got back.

Barney, Jess, and Max were out of the area affected by the pit trap, but all three of them turned to look in alarm.

“Are you okay?” Jess asked.

“Been better.” Shelby grabbed onto the drawer with her other hand and started to pull herself up.

“She did almost fall into a hole,” Max pointed out.

Mechanically, from the outside in, the floor around the hole began sliding back into place. Shelby pulled herself up and perched on the drawer while the floor repaired itself. It was a very awkward position, so she awkwardly pushed the drawer the rest of the way open, which didn’t seem to impact the mechanisms.

As the floor finished replacing itself, one of the weird red torches on the walls went dark-- it didn’t seem to extinguish its dusty flame, it just dimmed and stopped producing light.

Shelby climbed off the drawer very carefully, but it seemed like the pit trap was over. She looked at what was in the drawer.

It was empty, but it was also about half the depth it should be. Shelby tapped on the bottom a couple times, and then carefully, leaning over the drawer in case the pit trap reopened, slid it off. She tossed it on the floor close to the wall and looked at what was now visible in the drawer.

The edges of the drawer had piles of some red dust that might have been the stuff they put on ketchup chips, or it might have been dried blood. It was kind of shimmery and the same colour as the weird red torches.

Most of the space in the drawer was filled with photos of chickens. There was also an action figure of some superhero dressed as a cow in a skirt, a printout of Bidoof’s pokedex entry, some printed-out screenshots of anime girls, and a tiny plushie toy of another chicken. This entire setup was organized on top of a large poster of Hatsune Miku.

“What’s in there?” Barney asked nervously.

“Mostly… chicken photos?”

“What?” Jess made her way over to the drawer and looked inside. After some hesitation, Max and Barney also joined in.

“This is weird to think about,” Shelby observed.

Jess stared at one of the chicken photos. “Y… yeah.”

Max picked up the superhero figurine and threw it at a wall. It dropped to the ground but didn’t break. “It doesn’t matter how many chickens he owns or how much anime he watches! I don’t even remember what he did, but it was bad.”

“We don’ts want him to know we were in heres, though,” Barney whispered.

Jess gestured to the still-dim torch. “It’s probably too late for that.”

“So the useful intel we have on Dr. Ross is…” Shelby listed off all the things in the drawer while picking up each one and dropping it in a pile on the ground. “...and he likes Hatsune Miku enough to have a big poster of her.” 

When she pulled the Miku poster away from the drawer, though, there was something else under it.

Slightly rearranged from their neat setup: a collection of photographs.

Shelby looked at the pile of polaroids and did a double take. She just stared at them for a few seconds. Barney, Max, and Jess also seemed equally shocked.

The first picture Shelby noticed was innocuous enough: Ross, in civilian clothes rather than his lab coat, dabbing.

But from there it started to get weird.

Ross at some sort of cosplay convention, dressed up as a princess… accompanied by Max as some sort of prince. Ross showing off some sort of glove-shaped hat to Sky, who seemed to find that hilarious. Ross and Barney, Ross lying on a pile of chicken plushies and Barney with a goat in his lap. Ross and Jess, dressed up in anime schoolgirl uniforms and playing some video game together.

Ross and Shelby, playing Mario Kart.

“That didn’t happen,” Shelby felt the need to point out, even though the other three were equally represented. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never done that.”

“I know,” Jess replied. “The weird thing is, I actually used to own an anime schoolgirl costume like that.”

There were possibly dozens more pictures: Jess taking a selfie while Ross and Max goofed off in the background; Ross with an elbow on Shelby’s head, visibly bantering with Max; Ross, Sky, Barney, and… Cory? around a breakfast table, having a food fight; Ross and Max, ironically enough, playing UNO. Even one with Nick, who was posing with what looked like a video game console made of styrofoam and grinning salesman-ish-ly.

A group picture: Ross in the middle, between Sky (waving enthusiastically) and Barney, and the fourth person in the picture, fiddling with some sort of scientific contraption (??!?), would have made Shelby do an entirely new double take if she hadn’t been doing that constantly since first noticing the photographs.

Pointing the picture out, she somewhat rhetorically asked, “is that Red?”

“I think so,” said Jess.

“How deep does this rabbits holes go?” Barney asked.

Most of the ones under the images they’d seen thus far had less people in them, instead largely focusing on machines. Some sort of large-screened device, displaying the number five in lights. What looked like a Mario lucky block, covered in a lot of question marks; Ross’s hand was visible in that picture, holding a cookie. A box with trapdoors attached to the sides, which were blurry from rapid movement. Several of the pictures had plain black stickers blocking off something that would have been in the sky.

“I’m not saying that it’s Photoshop--” Jess brought up the subject somewhat hesitantly. “--but it could be. But if it is, he’s really good at Photoshop.”

“You could be right,” Shelby said. “Hey, this one looks kinda like that door thing in the corner!”

The contraption in the picture did really look like the door thing in the corner, but with reinforced metal doors rather than freezer doors. Barney looked at it and blanched.

“I reallys don’t likes that. It looks like some sorts of death trap.”

It didn’t really, but it did look like if the doors closed, it would be a very small space.

There was only a handful of other pictures that weren’t of assorted contraptions or the inexplicable group photos.

One of them was a selfie Ross had taken in front of a large pile of dirt, labelled at the bottom ‘Selfie with Barney’.

Barney clearly pushed himself out of his severe concern to muster some indignance at that one. “Hey, so justs because I likes dirt, he thinks, hah, it’s funny to do that?”

“Does he even know you like dirt?” Max asked.

“I don’t actuallys know,” Barney answered.

Another one was a picture of what looked like some weird pinkish quicksand in a fenced-in area. The thing in the sky that was in the corner had been scribbled over with black Sharpie, but it looked like it was something red.

“Hey,” Jess said, pointing to something in the quicksand, “it looks like someone was trapped in there.”

Shelby squinted at the silhouette barely cresting the surface and had to agree, but also to fight down a rising panic she couldn’t explain. Beside that shape, a crumpled paper crown was halfway above the pink substance. It reminded Shelby of the ones she used to make and a barrette she had in her hair right now.

“Yeah, that’s really creepy,” she conceded.

The last picture was heavily Sharpie-d out, almost entirely scribbled over and with a little note accusing one of the two people in it of being a jerk and a weirdo. It was difficult to tell who was in it, but one of the two looked like Ross. Something about his expression was only a bit less braindead than the average zombie, or maybe just very beaten like he’d sorely lost, and it kind of looked like his eyes were red, although it was hard to tell because they were also quite bloodshot.

The other person in the photograph, the one with an accusatory note pointing to him, was more heavily obscured, but it wasn’t easy to miss how much he looked like Sky. A line of marker blocked out half of his somewhat sinister grin, but it also kind of sort of looked like he had horns?

That somehow managed to top off everything else in the drawer for sheer weirdness, but the two people weren’t the only focus of the picture, nor the most aggressively drawn-over: most of the photo was actually taken up by what kind of looked like a sculpture of the sun, made out of some sort of red material that resembled all the torches and dust all over the room. Even in the photograph, just looking at it gave Shelby a shiver. She picked it up and squinted at it.

“Hey,” Jess said, “there’s something written on the back.”

Shelby flipped it over and all four of them read the text on it. The simple message was written in red ink that had faintly run at some point, and Shelby really hoped it wasn’t blood.

Scrawled across the back of the photograph: ‘The Red Sun never sets.’

“What does that mean?” Jess asked.

“Well, that thing looks kinda like a sun that’s red.” Shelby pointed it out in the picture.

“That’s really creepy,” Max observed.

“Yeah, we should gets outta heres,” Barney said.

“We should at least cover our tracks.” Shelby stuffed most of the photos back into the drawer, but after a moment’s consideration grabbed the Mario Kart one, the one with Nick, the pink substance one, and the scribbled-out one, and stuffed them into her pocket. “This is too weird to leave here, though,” she explained.

Jess grabbed the anime schoolgirl outfits picture and one that showed her as a somewhat panicked-looking security guard in a selfie with Ross, Sky and Barney. Max took the UNO one.

They quickly stuffed all the photos and all the other stuff back into the drawer. “Is that everything?” Jess asked. “Because once this drawer closes it’d probably better stay closed.”

“Yeah, I think so. Everyone stand back in case it trips the trap again.” Shelby waited until the others had done so and then clambered on top of the filing cabinet to close the drawer, but it didn’t actually trip the trap.

“Cans we go already?” Barney was already a couple steps up the stairs.

Everyone made it out of the building as quickly as possible, with Shelby struggling to pull the storeroom door closed and ultimately being unsuccessful. They ducked down in the next alleyway to reflect on what just happened.

“That was weird,” said Max.

“That was CREEPY,” Shelby added.

“Let’s never do thats again,” Barney said nervously.

Jess was looking in her bag concernedly. “Same, but I just realized that I didn’t put this back.” She pulled a package out of her bag. “It was in one of the other filing cabinets, and it looked kinda like some sort of hit list of us?”

She held it out. The first page had thumbnail photos that might have been copied from the ones in the drawer, including Barney, Sky, Max, Shelby, and a couple other people they didn’t recognize. Next to each picture was a few notes-- chemical names, formula names-- it looked like he’d been planning out what experiments to do on each of them. ‘Reanimation’ next to Barney; ‘Test: Immunity’ next to Max; ‘Memory (+awake???)’ next to Sky; a bunch of unintelligibly scientific words next to Shelby’s. At the bottom, it read ‘Progress experiments! Do NOT let their deaths be pointless.’

“I flipped through it quickly, and like half the pages are blank,” Jess added. “The rest are all kinda like this one.”

“Can I see?” Shelby gingerly took it. “I don’t want him to find out we went through his notes, but I also don’t want to go put this back.” She flipped to the next page.

The next page also had thumbnail images, but rather than being just about experiments it was mostly observations. After that, the next few pages were mostly people from their group, some of whom didn’t have photos from the drawer and instead were accompanied by yearbook photos and the like. In one case, ‘Formula X Test Subject’ was next to a picture of Ghetto.

Shelby flipped the page and realized she’d missed a page, but the page after the page she missed was also kind of weird, featuring a variety of small pictures of Ross (including some of the ones in the drawer) and being otherwise completely blank, if very faintly tinted kind of reddish. She tilted it slightly, and for a split second it looked like something flashed across it, but that kinda seemed like a trick of the light. She flipped back to the page she’d missed. 

The thumbnail photos on this one were pictures of Nick.

There was one that looked like it was copied from the photo in the drawer; there was one that Shelby recognized as his high school yearbook photo, with the yearbook quote under it (‘The Hot Twin’; Shelby’s had said ‘The Cool Twin’); and there was a very lousy drawing of him as a pirate.

The notes for him were scrawled all over the place: ‘Evidence that you can’t rely on past observations’; (directly underneath that one: ‘Twins???’;) ‘Group leader’; ‘Trusts by default’; ‘Really not a fan of betrayal’.

Several of the notes that seemed more like plans were scratched out, possibly as they’d failed. ‘Kill off in White House explosion’; ‘Red called dibs’.

But one of the plans was not crossed off at all.

Looking at it, Shelby automatically and panickedly thought back to where Nick was now. There’d been an argument in their group a couple days ago, at the end of which Nick announced he was going scavenging for a while. Ghetto had insisted on joining him.

They hadn’t been back yet, but supply runs and avoiding arguments could take a while.

But the notes said, ‘Wait til he’d be busy for a while anyways and is mostly alone-- obnoxious habit of rescuing each other’.

The specifics of the plan were nearly illegible, but there were definitely several formulas and a note reading ‘Test.’

Shelby dropped the file like it was virulent and struggled to choke back the panic in her voice, even the weird photos pushed to the very back of her mind. “Guys, we need to get back right now. We need to find Nick and Ghetto RIGHT NOW.”

 

Blocks away, a scream of furious anguish doesn’t even escape the building it’s trapped in.

It’s too late.

**Author's Note:**

> Did that go a bit off the rails? Yes.  
> Am I sorry? It's about a 50/50.


End file.
